RosYama

Things get done a hundred times more slowly than fairy tales are told. But they do get done. At last, I can present our new project: RosYama. The road to it was long and painful. Here’s the short version: 1. On August 31 last year, I wrote a post about Fyodor Yezeev from Krasnogorsk.  Fyodor didn’t like the pothole in the road near his house. And he successfully forced the authorities to fix it by using his knowledge of the law. The pothole did not comply with GOST road surface standards (GOST is the Russian state technical standard), and by law it had to be repaired within 10 days. Back then, I suggested turning this into a repeatable process. 2. Fyodor’s story was a big success, lots of people responded, and on September 7, 2010, it was decided to launch an online road quality monitoring project on the Ushahidi platform (that was my first mistake). We created a Google Group, dozens of people joined right away, and work began. 3. On October 28, it was announced that the basic site was ready, with only minor finishing work needed. And that’s exactly where everything fell apart. Crowdsourcing, which looks wonderful and inspiring in theory, did not work in practice. First and foremost because of my fundamental incompetence in website development. Second, because I never had the time to dig into everything in detail. A person who can’t tell PHP from PND can’t manage a team of developers who, on top of that, are working remotely as volunteers. It took me four months to realize this simple fact. While I’m on the subject, I want once again to thank everyone who took part in the project at that stage and apologize for wasting so much of their time.. 4. In February, I did what I should have done in September of last year: I turned to professionals. I called the guys at Greensight, who had previously built navalny.ru/ for me free of charge. This time free didn’t work out, but after some fiery appeals and intimidation they agreed to do everything at the minimum price. If anyone is curious, we have no secrets: 200,000 Russian rubles (about 5,000 euros or 6,800 US dollars at the time), of which I’ve already paid 100,000. Of course I hate spending the money, but no one else is to blame here—reputation matters more. If you said the project would launch, but couldn’t launch it through crowdsourcing, then pay for it yourself. 5. The original plan was to call it www.st1234.ru—after the article of the Administrative Offenses Code regulating this issue. My creative idea, and a very bad one too. It’s impossible to say out loud.  So we decided to imitate the quite successful name RosPil and call the project RosYama instead. (There’s no logo yet. Simply because I have no idea how to draw an eagle holding potholes in its claws. So we’ll hold off on the new criminal case too) That concludes the historical excursus. Behold: RosYama The idea is very simple. There’s a pothole in a road you use every day (or protruding rails, a manhole cover, etc.) that drives you crazy. And rightly so, because if the pothole violates GOST standards (for example, if it is deeper than 5 cm / 2 inches), then it must be repaired, and the official responsible for that road must be held accountable. You photograph the pothole and upload it to the site, indicating the address. RosYama automatically generates a complaint for you, which you send to the traffic police. You send the complaint. RosYama counts down 37 days for your demands to be fulfilled. If they are not, it generates the text of a complaint to the prosecutor’s office. There’s no need to register on the site separately. You can use your Twitter, LiveJournal, Facebook, or VKontakte account.

How it works in practice. My example: Outside my home, on the sidewalk next to the building entrance, there was a manhole cover. A sewer manhole. Like this:

It had been like that since the building was constructed. It was a huge nuisance, especially for mothers with strollers. When my first child was born (9 years ago), we complained bitterly about that manhole. When the second was born (3 years ago), we were still complaining bitterly. All the moms and dads in the building had been grumbling and cursing about it for years. But what could you do about it, really?   I decided to use RosYama. The manhole stuck up by 25–30 cm (about 10–12 inches), while under GOST standards it should be no more than 2 cm (under 1 inch). A month later, they cut it down.  Now it looks like this:

Mothers with strollers can roll by without any problem now.   Of course, it doesn’t work this quickly and effectively in 100% of cases.   Another example. Our previous office was near Kozhevnicheskaya Street. Those who use it regularly know it was an absolute road disaster. Like this every couple of meters:

We photographed all the potholes and protruding rails and demanded that everything be fixed.   Two weeks later, trucks arrived with Tajik migrant workers, and the potholes were half-heartedly filled with asphalt, which of course fell apart again a week later. We photographed everything again and filed complaints again.   The brazen traffic police officers wrote back saying there was no more damage.

(If you use Kozhevnicheskaya Street, this response will make you happy.) We went to court. And although the court refused to declare the inaction of the Central Administrative District prefecture illegal, we did force the prefecture to acknowledge that the road was in unsatisfactory condition and to sue the contractor. (And here we smoothly transition to why RosYama is also a fight against corruption.) It turned out that Kozhevnicheskaya Street had supposedly undergone major repairs not long ago and was still under warranty. Which means the contractor was supposed to fix it at its own expense. But it didn’t. And apparently it hadn’t really repaired it in the first place. The prefecture, meanwhile, was not particularly bothered. Obviously, the contractor was simply pocketing the money allocated for repairs and sharing it with the prefecture and the people who were supposed to oversee the work. The officials, in turn, turned a blind eye to the potholes and made no effort to put the contractor on the blacklist of bad-faith suppliers. Nothing new there—one hand washes the other. And it will keep happening until we intervene. And if we don’t, they’ll “repair” Kozhevnicheskaya another three hundred times on paper. I highly recommend this text—it gives an excellent sense of the scale of corruption in the road construction sector and how much money gets siphoned off through something as simple as “repairing” potholes. So, in short, I urge everyone to use it, get rid of the hated pothole you drive around every day, and send us your suggestions for improvement. We’re going to keep developing RosYama and use it as the basis for several interesting experiments and legal cases. And remember: total spending on road construction in 2011 will exceed 700 billion rubles. Exactly as much of that money will be stolen as we allow to be stolen. Dmitry Volov is coordinating the RosYama project for us here. He is eager to hear opinions, suggestions, and complaints. Update. Too many visitors. RosYama is down, but it will rise again soon.